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Sorcerer Review, and News of Impending Doom
osworks writes: "There is an review of the Sorcerer Linux distribution over at linuxworld.com that is worth a read. I've been running SGL on my Inspiron for a month now, and have the same impression as the author. It took a really long time to install, but was educational and rather fun. Some discouraging news near the bottom about how the maintainer needs some development help, or it will be the end of Sorcerer. This is one of the most exciting new distros to come along in a long time, and that would be a shame."
Red Wizard needs food badly.
I have all three of these installed on my hard drive.
Sorcerer is pretty interesting, and certainly easier to use than the others, but if you have problems... good luck. The web page is spare, and the mailing lists aren't really busy enough yet to make for a good replacement.
As far as I can tell, Gentoo is made by Debian types who wanted to be able to use the BSD ports system to download and compile all their software. Perhaps they prefer the GPL to the BSD license. Anyway, like Debian, Gentoo has a "Social Contract". Functionally, you can do the same things that are possible in Sorcerer, although the commands are slighly more complicated, and less friendly to newbies.
Finally, there's FreeBSD, which has many more programs in its software collection than either Sorcerer or Gentoo. Frankly, unless people are really against the BSD license, think the Linux kernel is much better, or need to play some game that's tailored for Linux, I would recommend going with FreeBSD. Not only does FreeBSD have many programs, but it has many more port maintainers to track whether the system is working.
That said, I'm going to Sorcerer and Gentoo on my hard drive, and will periodically check to see if their software collections have become competitive. If either had ports for as many programs as FreeBSD, this would be a much harder decision.
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Both are source-based distros. Gentoo uses a Python and bash-based package system, influenced by the bsd ports system. It handles required dependencies automatically, and chooses optional ones based on a config file--you indicate if you want kde functionality in your apps, for example. Sorcery just prompts you for each dependency.
That comparison is typical for the approaches to the two distros. Sorcery asks/tells everything in a very straightforward way. Gentoo is more automatic.
On the other hand, Gentoo doesn't really have an installer at this point, just a shell and a bunch of well-written instructions.
At this point I prefer Sorcery, because no other distro has made me feel like I really knew exactly what was going on with my box.
What everyone failes to mention is the self healing ability of sorcerer which is IMHO its biggest strength. Doing #cast --fix will verify all applications on your system, recompile the once whose depandancies have changed, put back in place missing files and symlinks.
One of the big challanges for sorcerer was upgrade from db3 to db4. That one tooked me 2 #cast --fix till system self healed. Try doing this with any other distro and see what happens.
Damn, it's a good thing Linus didn't/doesn't subscribe to this philosophy. From what I read it sounds like he really wants to keep the project up, but he needs help. If I find a free minute I might look at the spells and see if I can help out, maybe you should do the same.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
Gentoo Linux is an excellent distro that is very similar to Sorceror in the fact that you compile everything from scratch. It uses a Free-BSD style ports system, and it has a command-line driven package tool that's similar to debian's apt-get. The portage tree is huge and contains thousands of apps. One major advantage over Sorceror is that Gentoo has a very active development community, and it isn't in any danger of dissappearing anytime soon. If you want a distro where everything is compiled explicitly for your hardware for blistering fast speed, you should check out Gentoo. It's my favorite distro, and I've tried virtually all of them.
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
It would really be a shame if SGL stopped getting support. I switched from Mandrake a month ago and I'm more than satisfied with the results. Yes, the install is more difficult and time consuming, but it was worth it for the experience I got out of it. I now have an intricate knowledge about how the inner details of linux works.
I also believe that their method of installing applications is better than any binary install system out there (apt-get/rpm). Although it may take a bit longer to compile things, they're installed *right* and are compiled specific for your architecture. All dependencies are automagically downloaded, compiled, and installed without any user interaction (although you can interact if you want).
No other distro provides more control, flexibility, or ease of use better than sorcery. I hope it doesn't go away.
'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.' -HST
It builds and bootstraps a basic utilitarian GNU/Linux installation all from source packages.
I think its great as both a production system and an educational build/install process.
The nice part is you end up with a fully functional linux you have built yourself. You will know _every_ package installed and why.
And all the mystery of linux will be revealed in your build process, its very educational.
Now, there is an partner group with the linux from scratch folks called automated linux from scratch.
From the automated linux from scratch site:
"Automated Linux From Scratch or ALFS, is a project that aims to create a generic framework of an extenable system builder and package installer using XML to describe the process.
It's main goal is to automate the process of creating a LFS system."
I have never used it, but I have used the straight linux from scratch and it is wonderful.
Wax on, wax off baby!
Frankly, the idea of compiling absolutely everything from source 'just because' seems a little bit of a waste of time. The vast majority of software will only see very very minimal performance increase compared to a well built Debian package with the usual careful choice of compiler flags. (Note: compiling for your CPU's architecture vs. generic i386 makes little difference today since all modern CPU's do very extensive instruction scheduling and out-of-order execution.) Furthermore, from what I saw of Sorcerer, the chosen compiler flags are system-wide instead of being based on the individual packages needs. This is not wise. So, I personally think that Sorcerer is redundant considering the quality and ease of use of Debian source packages for the few programs that can really benefit from hand-tuned compiler flags (such as data compression or encryption software). You just edit the rules and run two commands.